Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
“Brilliant ... It’s testament to [Lynne Ramsay's] skill as a director that even though her adaptation of Shriver’s book is a ruthless one, the film feels entirely faithful to its spirit. More importantly, Kevin is a piece of vital, visceral cinema in its own right; teeming with words and images to mull over, pick apart and talk about. And you will need to talk about it.”
20/10/2011
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The Times
Kate Muir
“Scottish-born Ramsay has made a confident, mature film, outdoing her well-received Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. She builds up a tension that makes you want to scream out, just for the relief of breaking Eva’s martyred silence. Ramsay’s eye for background is also sharp: the phoniness of the family’s McMansion with its perfect white sofas; the sad sleaze of the travel bureau where Eva works. The use of lighthearted music (country and western, Lonnie Donegan) at utterly inappropriate moments adds a dark irony to the proceedings.”
21/10/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“What American Psycho was to consumerism, We Need to Talk About Kevin is to both sexism and feminism, a brilliantly extreme parable, operatically pessimistic.”
20/10/2011
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
“Thought-provoking, confident and fearless. It’s experimental but never alienating and horrific in all the right ways.”
21/10/2011
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Total Film
Philip Kemp
“It’s the kind of film that’s impossible to shrug from your mind. It stays embedded like a sliver of ice, causing you to shudder again days, even weeks, after seeing it.
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20/10/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“This may be one of the most disquieting films ever made about a parent-and-child relationship … It's worth pointing out that Ramsay's film is a bold one in terms of current sensibilities. Every week I see movies in which characters, however stupid or dislikeable, get a free pass by showing what special parents they are: this is because Hollywood has elevated children to the status of gods who must be appeased. The ability to bond with your kid is now shorthand for, "I am, after all, a wonderful human being". We Need to Talk about Kevin would be remarkable just in terms of its kicking against this phony piety.”
21/10/2011
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Empire Magazine
Liz Beardsworth
“Swinton and Miller play this complex, layered relationship to perfection, and it’s their strange, unsettling chemistry — eventually to turn cataclysmic — that holds the film in perfect stasis between domestic drama and pure horror.”
17/10/2011
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“Ramsay splashes red throughout the film - paint, wine, lipstick, a dress, jam, the flashing red lights of the emergency services. Yet you never feel like tittering ... It is just as bloody as Macbeth, although with hardly a drop of actual blood shown.
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21/10/2011
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The Scotsman
Siobhan Synnot
“Kevin is bleak, but Ramsay exercises restraint too. She could have pumped up the horror with stretched out depictions showing Kevin at his worst. Instead she drives in the nail with a single blow – a sardonic look, a contemplative close-up, a silence that allows us to draw our own conclusions. ”
18/10/2011
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The Observer
Philip French
“Lynne Ramsay ... and her co-adaptor, Rory Kinnear, have dropped the epistolary technique. That would have demanded a voiceover narrator and greatly restricted the film's tempo. But they've maintained much of the book's tone through the casting of the estimable, closely controlled Tilda Swinton. ”
01/01/1900
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“For me, the film is psychologically too thin. It starts from the premise that we need to talk about Kevin, but it doesn’t actually have much to say about him because it doesn’t believe in causality, personal responsibility, evil, psychiatry or therapy. So what’s left to say? ”
23/10/2011
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Uncut Magazine
Jonathan Romney
“The only sour note is a sometimes overstated take on middle-American crassness, but otherwise this is a powerful comeback from an individual Brit director.
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24/10/2011
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“Ramsay traps us ... Either we believe that Eva is delusional, or we accept that Kevin terrorised her from the day he was born - in which case we might be the sort of viewers who think the Omen films should be filed under "Documentary".
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20/10/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“Frustrating as it is, this is a Lynne Ramsay film to the hilt. It's not the Kevin you know, and it may not be the Kevin you want – but if you see it, you'll certainly need to talk about it.
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23/10/2011
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The Financial Times
Antonia Quirke
“The whole movie seems to take place less on screen than on Swinton’s face on screen: she is the screen, the canvas. Sickly, apprehensive, Swinton has a face that’s always looking for grievances, a face, one feels, used to rather grandly and patiently examining those of shamefaced men.”
20/10/2011
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“This is cheap grand guignol posing as a valuable insight into the male psyche. Tilda Swinton’s performance is towering, but the story around her doesn’t convince.”
21/10/2011
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The Daily Express
Henry Fitzherbert
“Atmospheric and beautifully shot but ultimately empty and meaningless, the picture plays like an art-house version of The Omen as we track Kevin's journey to infmay through the memories of his mother.
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19/10/2011
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